HMS ''Porcupine'' was a

Royal Navy The Royal Navy (RN) is the United Kingdom's naval warfare force. Although warships were used by English and Scottish kings from the early medieval period, the first major maritime engagements were fought in the Hundred Years' War against F ...

3-gun wooden paddle steamer. It was built in

Deptford Dockyard Deptford Dockyard was an important naval dockyard and base at Deptford on the River Thames, operated by the Royal Navy from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It built and maintained warships for 350 years, and many significant events a ...

in 1844 and served as a survey ship. It was first employed in the survey of the

Thames Estuary The Thames Estuary is where the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea, in the south-east of Great Britain. Limits An estuary can be defined according to different criteria (e.g. tidal, geographical, navigational or in terms of salini ...

by Captain Frederick Bullock. In 1847, in common with other paddle-steamers used in surveying, ''Porcupine'' was diverted to famine relief work in Ireland and western Scotland. She then spent some time in the Mediterranean, returining to England in 1851. In the Crimean war she was commanded by

Henry Charles Otter Henry Charles Otter (1807 – 26 March 1876) was a Royal Navy officer and hydrographic surveyor, noted for his work in charting Scotland in the mid-19th century. He was active in surveying in the Baltic Sea during the war with Russia (1853-6) and ...

, and returned to surveying work in Scotland, still under Otter, in 1854. In 1858 she crossed the Atlantic in support of the laying of the first Atlantic cable. In 1862 ''Porcupine'' surveyed off the west coast of Ireland under the command of Richard Hoskyn in preparation for the laying of the replacement

transatlantic telegraph cable Transatlantic telegraph cables were undersea cables running under the Atlantic Ocean for telegraph communications. Telegraphy is now an obsolete form of communication, and the cables have long since been decommissioned, but telephone and data a ...

. Previous surveys had shown very steep descents at the edge of the

continental shelf A continental shelf is a portion of a continent that is submerged under an area of relatively shallow water, known as a shelf sea. Much of these shelves were exposed by drops in sea level during glacial periods. The shelf surrounding an island ...

, but Hoskyn's work identified a suitable route to the west of Slyne Head. The primary purpose of the voyage was surveying but samples of the sea bed were brought up from considerable depths. One, from , contained a shell of a new species of

brachiopod Brachiopods (), phylum Brachiopoda, are a phylum of trochozoan animals that have hard "valves" (shells) on the upper and lower surfaces, unlike the left and right arrangement in bivalve molluscs. Brachiopod valves are hinged at the rear end, w ...

. The samples also provided evidence for the processes involved in the formation of sedimentary rock. From 1863, ''Porcupine'' was commanded by Edward Killwick Calver, who was in charge of the survey of the east coast of England. In 1869 she was chartered by the

Royal Society The Royal Society, formally The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, is a learned society and the United Kingdom's national academy of sciences. The society fulfils a number of roles: promoting science and its benefits, re ...

to investigate the deep sea bed to the west of Ireland with the intention of looking for living organisms below 600 m depth. The azoic theory of

Edward Forbes Edward Forbes FRS, FGS (12 February 1815 – 18 November 1854) was a Manx naturalist. In 1846, he proposed that the distributions of montane plants and animals had been compressed downslope, and some oceanic islands connected to the mainlan ...

hypothesised that life could not exist below this depth due to the great pressure. The Porcupine expedition disproved this theory by bringing up animals from 3000 m. This led to the funding of the

Challenger expedition The ''Challenger'' expedition of 1872–1876 was a scientific program that made many discoveries to lay the foundation of oceanography. The expedition was named after the naval vessel that undertook the trip, . The expedition, initiated by Wil ...

to survey deep sea around the world. The

Porcupine Bank Porcupine Bank is an area of the Irish shelf, on the fringes of the Atlantic Ocean approximately west of Ireland. The relatively raised area of seabed, 200 m below sea level at its highest, lies between the deep-water Porcupine Seabight and Roc ...

, an area of seabed to the west of Ireland partly detached from the continental shelf by a failed rift event, was discovered by this expedition and is named after this ship.Porcupine Marine Natural History Society
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* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Porcupine (1844) 1844 ships Ships built in Deptford Victorian-era naval ships of the United Kingdom